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Journalism of Courage
Stroll through a woodland or forest anywhere in India — whether in the hills or plains — and you may at some point be brought to a halt by a secretive drumming coming from somewhere around you, but difficult to pinpoint. You cock your head, the drumming stops, and then, from another point, an answering tom-tomming starts. It seems like you’ve been spotted and are under observation; who knows, maybe a large cooking pot has just been put on the fire somewhere not too far away by the local headhunters! But if you scan the trees around you carefully, you may be lucky enough to spot a usually pied or highly speckled bird, often with a scarlet bottlebrush crest and bright black eyes, peering at you from behind the trunk of a nearby tree. Depending on where you are in the country, it could also be green or black. Then, it seems to hitch itself up (or down) the tree trunk, fireman style, and peer at you again from the opposite side to check if you’re still around. If it doesn’t like what it sees, it might drum a bit more and then take off, often leaving a ringing cackle of laughter in its wake. In India, one of the commonest of the tribe of head-bangers is the blackrumped flameback, earlier better known as the golden-backed woodpecker. And yes, this one actually does have a back like a bar of bullion!
Of the approximately 200 species of woodpeckers world-wide, around 32 are to be found in India. They may vary in size from 7 cm. to seven times that, but their USP worldwide has got to be their immunity from headaches, despite slamming their skulls against immovable objects (tree trunks, the sides of houses, chimney stacks — even government-owned ones) at forces up to 1200 g as many as 12,000 times a day! That’s each impact, 1,200 times the force of gravity! (The maximum we can survive is, perhaps, 100 g, which, a racing car driver might experience in a head-on crash). So, obviously, these birds are deep into hi-tech shock-absorbing technology, and, we have, of course, started slow-mo filming and analysing exactly what happens when they do go knock-knocking on heaven’s door like manic little jackhammers.
It’s all down to ingenious skull and beak design aimed at one thing: to protect the brain from being shaken to jelly and to divert as much as 97.5 per cent of the impact shock away from it. The entire skull itself is held firmly in place by a sort of seatbelt harness sling-like bone called the hyoid (which, we have too) that extends from under the beak, goes through the nostrils, splitting into two sections and wrapping its way around the skull from under the chin, around the back of the neck to meet up again at the top of the forehead.
The outside surface of the skull bone is dense, the inside soft and spongy, but, buttressed by microscopic beam-like bits of bone that form a mesh. The soft, spongy shock-absorbing sections are largest and concentrated on the front and the back of the head in order to absorb the maximum shock. The chisel-cum-crowbar-like beak too is designed to be asymmetric in that it diverts the energy of the impact towards the lower beak and the bottom of the skull — away from the brain. The brain itself is tiny, perhaps, just 2 grams (0.07 ounces), smooth and snugly encased, shaped a bit like half an orange with the flat side facing the impact side (the forehead) so as to spread the force of impact over as large an area as possible. Even so, it tends to heat up with the relentless tattooing. That’s why the woodpecker takes short breaks after beating a quick, brisk drum roll. The eyes are protected by a “third eyelid” — a thickened nictitating membrane which folds down across the eye just before impact protecting it from flying shards — and like a seatbelt — holds the eyeball itself in place and prevents it from exploding out of the socket due to the force of the impact. Even the nostrils are protected by bristly feathers which make sure nothing undesirable goes up the bird’s nose!
To enable them to hitch their way up or down or round the trunks of trees, woodpeckers have two toes facing forwards and two backwards (normally, birds have three toes, two facing forward and one backwards). The stiff tail helps it get “three points of contact” on the trunk, so useful for stability. Drumming is not merely done in order to panic and flush out creepy crawlies living in the bark, but also as a mode of communication — to seduce partners and drive away rivals.
It may take up to a month for a woodpecker to drill a residence. The bird will both roost as well as nest in it, and guard it fiercely. I’ve seen a blackrumped flameback oust a coppersmith barbet (which is smaller) from its rightful residence, enlarge the hole — and, then, in turn, be ousted by bees scouting for a new hive location. The birds eat the grubs, beetles, beetle-larvae found in the bark, assisted by a tongue which is long, glue-tipped and barbed and which curls around its victim and draws it back. Other items on the menu may include berries, caterpillars, spiders, birds’ eggs — and even nestlings. Often woodpeckers come down on to the ground to forage, but look quite comical hopping about.
Watch a woodpecker hard hat hammer away at a tree trunk, and you can’t help but sigh enviously. Oh, to have a head (and beak) like that! It would make even the most wooden babu cower at your approach, and be powerless to give you the slightest headache as you get your files cleared, blow by jackhammer blow!
